Happy Hour
by Doyle-sb4
Summary: Angel's one depressed puppet, but Harmony's not bad as a motivational speaker.


Title: Happy Hour  
  
Author: Doyle  
  
Pairing: Angel/Harmony (friendship)  
  
Rating: PG  
  
Notes: Puppet!Angel ficathon entry: request was drunkenness, Harmony as something other than a total bimbo and no NC-17  
  
Summary: Harmony the motivational speaker.  
  
"Harmony!"  
  
Harmony jumped, making the perfect, careful stroke of nail polish she'd been applying skid over her fingers and onto the desk. She fumbled the bottle, trying to screw the cap back on and get the intercom and get into happy-secretary-voice at the same time.  
  
"I'm here!"  
  
"Of course you're there, Harmony, where else would you be?" Angel sounded grumpy today. Grumpier than yesterday, and he'd been really mad then, and all she'd done was tell him they were refitting his private elevator to be more puppet-accessible. "Did Fred send up a status report?"   
  
At least he was doing better, she told herself. It was – she checked the hands of the chunky pink clock at her elbow - nearly twenty minutes since the last time he'd buzzed out to ask.   
  
"Knox just brought it up, I've got it here." Careful not to smudge her nails, she pulled the report from her in-tray. She scanned the front page nervously. "Uh, do you want me to bring it in? Or I could just give you the highlights, like a Reader's Digest version? You know, it's really true what that magazine says, laughter is the best medicine…"   
  
"Harmony!"  
  
"Bringing it in now."  
  
Harmony would be the first to hold up her hands (when they weren't busy drying) and say that she sometimes didn't get when people were being sarcastic, but she'd been reading these status reports for the past week and even she could tell that Fred and Knox were getting impatient with Angel.  
  
" 'Tests, once again, proved inconclusive. Science department requests full-time employee for writing of status reports, preferably intern, penitent criminal or similar…' "   
  
Uh-oh, his big eyebrows were doing that pointy thing again. Harmony, who was standing behind his chair and turning the pages when he gave her the nod, tried to subtly shuffle backwards.  
  
"Fire the science division," he snapped.  
  
"Sure thing." He'd fired every section of the company at least three times each. The girls down in steno said that Wes's department was way in front with five, but that with the Oscars coming up the smart money was on Lorne stealing first place.   
  
"What's this?" Angel poked a thick, fuzzy finger at a blacked-out line.  
  
"Scientists," she shrugged. "They probably had a test result that was forbidden by… Einstein… so they had to, um. Make it go away."  
  
Angel stared blankly at her. "Yeah, great." He slumped back in his chair. His feet hardly touched the edge of the seat. "Tell them to keep trying."  
  
Keeping back a sigh of relief, she scooped up the folder. "I will. You want I should type these up?" She nodded at the scrappy pile of papers on the desk. He was getting the hang of holding a pen, so long as it was a Magic Marker, but he could still only fit a few words onto each page. "Oh, and Sebassis called. I told him you were majorly swamped this week but you can see him next Friday."  
  
"He probably knows anyway. Bet the good news is all over the city."   
  
"But Friday's a whole ten days away," she said. "I'm sure you'll be fixed by then." And she turned to hurry out, just in case she got yelled at again.  
  
She was almost at the door when he said, "Thank you, Harmony."  
  
The first thing she did, back at her desk, was pick up the phone to call down to Science.  
  
"Hey, we got fired again," she heard Knox tell their team. "Puts us level with Research!" someone else cheered in the background. "We kick their magic asses."  
  
Harmony frowned. "The Sesame Street crack, hello? So not funny." She'd drawn through it before Angel could see it and get growly, but it was still mean. He was their boss. He deserved respect from the underlings, even if he was three feet tall and made of felt.   
  
"We're sorry," Knox said, still sounding like he was chuckling. "I mean, our boss is a m…"  
  
"Ix-nay on the uppet-may. Gunn says," she checked the memo that she'd spiked onto one of her unicorn's horns, "we're meant to call him a puppet unless and until the Henson people say it's okay."  
  
"Yeah, we've been working with their research department… But come on, Harm, even they think it's funny."   
  
"Just keep sending up the reports," she said, hoping she sounded as firm and in charge as she had the week when Cordy had been gross with mono and she'd had to head up the cheerleading team. "If you find out anything new I want to hear about it right away. Or sooner." She slammed the phone back in its cradle. "Oops!" Too much slamming. She picked through the pieces of plastic and circuitboard, dismayed, and wondered if Angel was going to take that out of her pay.  
  
"Angel?" She scanned the room. "Bossy? Are you under the desk again?"  
  
"Stupid piece of crap…"  
  
There he was, nearly right inside the cabinet beneath the TV. A miniature bottle flew over his head and landed on the carpet with a soft thud.  
  
Angel sat on the floor, mouth turned all the way down.  
  
"I was just leaving," Harmony said. "My shift is over so I'm going home to get a good night's sleep to be extra-awake in the morning. Plus, I have a big container of blood in the fridge. Cow's blood. Maybe with some otter but I have a distant cousin who sets me up with that, it's not from your private stock."  
  
"Blood," Angel said, sounding like Harmony sometimes felt when she remembered spending days tanning by her grandparents' pool or at the beach. "I remember blood."  
  
She sniffed. The room reeked of alcohol. "Angel," she said, trying her best to sound kind but disapproving, someone who should be listened to, but not staked, "have you been drinking?"  
  
"Trying," he said. "Mostly I've been spilling." He flexed his little three-fingered hands. "It's the screw-caps."  
  
"Oh, I can help!" Glad to be useful, she trotted to his side, feeling the carpet before she sat down to made sure she wasn't going to cover her skirt in scotch. She opened the bottle that he'd thrown onto the floor and placed it carefully into one of his hands. He was small enough that it looked a little more like a regular-sized bottle.  
  
He tossed back the whole thing in one move. "Ahhh."  
  
"I didn't even know you could drink," she said. "Wasn't there a whole thing about how you can't have blood because it makes your foam itchy? Plus you get all messy and you don't want to go to the dry cleaners again."  
  
"I can't swallow. The alcohol just soaks in through the sk… through the material in my mouth."   
  
"Wow."   
  
He pointed at another bottle in the mini-bar. She opened it and passed it over, crinkling her nose at the smell. It was the kind of choking, eye-stinging drink her dad liked. Harmony preferred anything pink and fruity, little umbrella optional.  
  
Angel was swaying on the spot. "More."  
  
She automatically went to obey, then caught herself. "I think you're kind of drunk already. Isn't there a bartender thing where you don't give booze to people who're wasted?"  
  
He scowled. He wasn't really mad yet, though, she could tell, not like he'd got at the meeting three days ago when Fred tried to explain he should have turned back by now and they didn't know why he was still fun-sized. He'd yelled, a lot, and then he'd vamped out, and then Fred had awwwed over his teeny little fangs and he'd locked himself in the office for an hour.  
  
"Harmony," he said, "I'm not wasted, you're not a bartender, and I haven't signed your paycheck for this week yet, so give me the whiskey."  
  
There were only a couple of bottles left. The miniatures were all gone. She poured some whiskey into the bottle cap and helped him tip it into his mouth. He eyed the rest of the bottle but didn't say anything.   
  
"Okay, don't fire me," she said. "Or set fire to me, or anything with fire, 'cause I had a candles incident and it wasn't fun. But I think you might have a problem."  
  
He looked down at his soft body, his stumpy legs. "Gee, you think?"   
  
"A drinking problem," she said. "Geez, it's not like you chose to be a puppet, but you're the only one pouring this stuff down your throat. Into your mouth, I mean. Except for just then when I poured it for you and can I say the part about not firing me again?"  
  
His shoulders slumped. "I'm not gonna fire you. Go home, Harmony. I'll see you in the morning."   
  
The flask of blood and Julia Roberts DVD waiting at her apartment were looking really appealing. She picked up her bag but didn't get up. "I don't think I should."  
  
"Harmony…"  
  
"I mean it!" She twisted the bag in her hands, not caring that she'd smoosh the material or hurt her cosmetics inside. "Everybody's gone home and you're just going to sit here and drink yourself stupid, which is probably not gonna take long…"  
  
"Hey!"  
  
"…since you're already all -" She swayed back and forth on the spot, crossing her eyes. "And then you'll be grouchy tomorrow and you'll yell at people and they'll make you madder and tomorrow night when we're all gone you'll drink more. And it's not like the alcohol even has any place to go so you'll just drink more and more till you're squishing when you walk and drunk all the time and you're a Igood/I boss, Angel. I don't want that to happen to you."  
  
His eyes were round, shiny glass buttons, so they technically couldn't get bigger. There must have been something he could do with his face, though, maybe something with the eyebrows or the slightly-open mouth, because he looked astonished.  
  
"You think I'm a good boss?"  
  
"Sure," she said. "Way better than Mr. Linwood. He was a total sleazeball."  
  
Angel shook his head. She wanted to pet his hair, see if it was as soft and fuzzy as it looked, but decided he might rethink the firing thing. "And you actually like being my secretary?"  
  
"Yeah! I mean, I didn't, when nobody was talking to me and you were being mean, but it's good now, right? We're exactly like James Spader and the chick from that movie." She frowned, biting her lip. "Except for the spanking over the desk and the James Spader not being a puppet, but mostly. Ooh! We're like Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock!"  
  
"Tough call on which one I want to be," Angel muttered.  
  
"So who cares if you're a puppet," she finished. "You won't be one for always, and even if you were. You're Angel. And everybody else is still the same. You're still the boss of us."  
  
He didn't say anything for so long she was scared she was going to have to clear her desk and maybe make a run for the fire extinguisher. Then, for the second time that day he said, "Thank you, Harmony."  
  
He sounded… taller?  
  
"I should clean this up." Getting to his feet looked complicated. It meant rolling over onto his knees and using his hands to push up. Harmony thought about putting the bottles away for him, but when she'd joined the firm they'd made her watch a lame movie about not discriminating against the differently-abled. It wasn't polite to take over from somebody because they were in a wheelchair, or temporarily possessed by face-sucking demons, or a puppet.  
  
"Do you need me to do anything?"  
  
"Yeah. Could you, uh, get the elevator?"  
  
"Sure." She stood up, considerably more gracefully than he had, and tucked her bag and jacket over her arm again. They waited together till the elevator came, and when he asked she ducked inside to press the number. The doors-open was low enough down that he could hold it while she got out.  
  
"Goodnight, Harmony."  
  
The doors slid closed.  
  
A moment later, they opened again.  
  
"And, Harmony? Tell Knox – no, tell everybody - if they make a Big Bird joke ever again I'm going to find out if the Cannon Room's just a misleading name."  
  
She smiled. "You're the boss, boss."  
  
END 


End file.
